Anti-abortion campaigners gather in Merrion Square, Dublin, over plans to legalise abortions in Ireland when the mother's life is at risk. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

One of the follies of bad journalism is "neutrality": the idea that the truth occupies an unspecified position between two fixed points. In last night's Panorama on The Great Abortion Divide, it was implied that the truth of good abortion law is located somewhere in the Irish Sea, between the severe restrictions of Northern Ireland and the relative liberality of Great Britain. If abortion is so difficult to access in one part of the UK, implied Victoria Derbyshire's voiceover, and so easy to access in another, doesn't that mean both regions are doing something wrong?

The programme was extensively researched. It included articulate and nuanced interviews with women who spoke about their own experience of abortion. There was a mother who had a termination rather than give up her job and university place (she wished in retrospect that counselling had been offered), a young woman from Croydon who'd had several abortions (and regretted none of them: "I might look at it now and say, oh I could have X amount of babies; but could I look after them?"), a woman from Ireland who described the isolation of taking the boat, alone.

But overarching these individual testimonies, and contributions from familiar talking heads (Dr Peter Saunders of the Christian Medical Fellowship, Ann Furedi of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and the inevitable Nadine Dorries), was the idea that Great Britain and Northern Ireland represented the two extremes of the "divide", and Panorama's job was to mediate between them. If women in Northern Ireland have not enough reproductive freedom, then women in Great Britain must have too much. "Is abortion on demand what our law was designed for?" asked Derbyshire, as the programme stated that women in Great Britain are overwhelmingly granted abortions under what were called "questionable mental health grounds".

Strangely, the programme didn't explore the idea that the 1967 Abortion Act (a law which forces women to claim instability in order to make perfectly rational choices about their own lives and bodies) might be flawed. Of course, the 1967 Abortion Act wasn't designed to allow abortion on demand. It was designed to allay the very immediate and upsetting fact of women suffering hideous injury and death during self-administered or unregulated abortions. However, I like to think of "not condemning women to bleed out on a wad of towels" as the minimum in female bodily autonomy: the 1967 Abortion Act is a flawed start for reproductive rights, not their perfect expression in law.

Still, this questioning of the mental health provision at least allowed us the spectacle of anti-abortion voices performing a thrilling rhetorical backflip. For years, it has been part of the anti-abortion catechism that termination equals trauma. At the start of the programme, we heard a protester from a group displaying gory blow-ups of aborted foetuses justify his tactics by claiming that the trauma of seeing graphic medical images is nothing compared with the trauma women will suffer when they realise they've killed their unborn child. But the trauma contention was demolished by a systematic review, which found that women who experience unplanned pregnancy have the same risk of mental health complications whether they have an abortion or continue with the pregnancy.

So the anti-choicers adopted a new line, espoused by Dr Saunders in Panorama: if pregnancy carries no more risk of mental health problems than abortion, then abortion is unnecessary. The riposte to this, as a spokesperson for Education for Choice pointed out, is simple: the women in the systematic review had a choice, and the results would likely be very different if the researchers had been studying the effect of compulsory pregnancy, or indeed compulsory abortion.

It's the imperviousness of the anti-abortion position to evidence that makes Panorama's "impartial" approach so vulnerable to distortion. We don't even have fixed points here. Instead, on one side there's the fairly stable contention that women know what they're doing with their own bodies and have the right to do it; on the other, the embattled vessel of anti-choice, yawing off into the illogical distance, with poor old consensus caught in its ropes and yanked thrashing into the remote foam. What did we learn from this Panorama? Largely, that some people feel profoundly different things about abortion, but not much in terms of facts that would help us weigh these competing claims. Whatever you think about abortion, surely it's too important to be forced into the wonky framework of false balance.